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Period

1920s graphic-design styles

Styles that began in the 1920s, by the year the atlas gives for when each took shape. Stylogeny describes 18 of them. The earliest began in 1921, the latest in 1929. Of these, 3 are still in use.

← 1910s 1930s →

The 18 styles

Oldest first. Each has its own page: its design choices, where it comes from, and real works.

Estridentismo (Stridentist) Graphics1921–1927 · Latin America & CaribbeanMexico's first avant-garde (1921-27), launched when Manuel Maples Arce pasted his manifesto Actual No. 1 on Mexico City walls.
Italian Fascist Graphics (Romanità & Exhibition Photomontage)1921–1943 · Southern EuropeThe visual language of Italian Fascism, which turned modernist means to a cult of Rome and of the Duce.
Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22)1922–1929 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe print side of São Paulo's Modernismo (1922-29), set in jobbing print shops.
Czech Poetist Book Design (Devětsil)1922–1938 · Central EuropeThe book and magazine design of the Czech Devětsil circle, where Karel Teige and his colleagues turned constructivist tools (asymmetry, sans and slab capitals, heavy bars, photomontage) toward Poetism's lyrical celebration of travel, cinema, jazz and the circus.
Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book1922–1936 · Eastern EuropeThin, large picture books made in Petrograd/Leningrad from 1922 to the mid-1930s for Raduga and the Gosizdat children's department led by Samuil Marshak, with Vladimir Lebedev as art editor.
Die Neue Typographie1923–1940 · Central Europe, Western EuropeThe programme that turned avant-garde experiment into a functional typographic method, named by Moholy-Nagy in 1923 and codified in Jan Tschichold's 'elementare typographie' (1925) and Die neue Typographie (1928).
Mavo1923–1925 · East AsiaTokyo's anarchist avant-garde, founded in July 1923 by Murayama Tomoyoshi, back from a year in Berlin, with four former Futurists, and its magazine MAVO (seven issues, July 1924 to August 1925).
Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing)1923–1949 · East AsiaThe covers of China's New Literature.
Surrealist Graphics1924–1960 · Western Europe, North AmericaLaunched by André Breton's 1924 manifesto, Surrealism sought the marvellous in dreams, chance and the unconscious.
Amazonian Boat Lettering (Abridores de Letras)1925–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe painted boat names of Pará's rivers in the Brazilian Amazon, made for about a century by self-taught riverside painters (abridores de letras).
Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design1925–1960 · Middle East & North AfricaThe pictorial poster, label and ticket art of the young Turkish Republic, led by İhap Hulusi Görey after his Munich training in Ludwig Hohlwein's orbit, with Münif Fehim Özarman and, after 1943, Kenan Temizan.
Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art1925–1940 · North AmericaThe illustration, cover and jacket art of the New Negro movement, set by Aaron Douglas after he moved to Harlem in 1925 and studied with Winold Reiss.
Isotype Pictorial Statistics1925–1971 · Central Europe, Western EuropeA method of visual education developed by Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath (Reidemeister) and Gerd Arntz in Red Vienna from 1925, which turns statistics into rows of identical pictograms where a greater quantity is shown by more signs, never by bigger ones.
Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books1925–1990 · East AsiaPalm-sized Chinese picture books, about three by five inches, that tell a novel, opera, film or revolutionary story in hundreds of single framed drawings, one to a page, each with a short caption.
Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era)1929–1959 · OceaniaThe pictorial posters that the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA, 1929), state tourist bureaux, railways and shipping lines commissioned to sell Australia abroad and at home.
Filipino Komiks1929–1999 · Southeast AsiaThe Philippines' newsstand comics magazines, from Kenkoy in Liwayway (1929) and Ace's Pilipino Komiks (1947) to the fall of the Roces titles in the late 1990s.
Giallo Mondadori Covers (I Libri Gialli)1929–present · Southern EuropeThe cover system of Mondadori's crime series, Milan, from I Libri Gialli of 1929 to Il Giallo Mondadori today.
Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line)1929–present · Western Europe, Southern EuropeThe comic drawing style of Hergé's Tintin and the Brussels school, named 'klare lijn' by Joost Swarte in 1977.

The design choices they share

The choices these styles make more often than the 359 styles in the atlas as a whole, most telling first.

Where they come from

Their branches

All periods